#55: Conversation and permutation
Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
Passages in which similar material is ‘passed around’ presented good opportunities for understanding the richness of their conversational disposition. That metaphor suggests that one’s ‘answer’ to a colleague’s offering behaves like an everyday interpersonal interaction: one replies ‘in the moment’ to the exact context, not by forcing a predetermined, extrinsic ‘idea’ upon the situation. Again, it is crucial that this approach embraces wholeness from the outset. It is analogous to the way one adopts a particular tone of voice when contributing to a conversation: those subtle implications are always unique, and dependent on what has just happened. In one sense, then, imitative passages (such as b.16-19) have a ‘permutational’ quality; but such options never behave as isolated modules that interlock mechanistically. The artificiality of copying made clear that a ‘natural’ response to another’s utterance — a tone of voice that ‘makes sense’ — can never be understood independently of that relationship. This idea is key to ensemble generally, but we felt it to be absolutely central to the Czech Quartet’s interactions.
